This afternoon we took the ladder up to the block to place the last log in the swing set.
The cross bar.
Very happy with the end result!
Kids called it superiffic!
It's so high that when I pushed the girls I could make a cup of tea before they came swinging back! Awesome.
We had a pretty good run at getting the posts in plumb and level only had to dig three of the holes deeper or wider or longer! (Sarcasm) it was a pain in the backside!
Liza was introduced to the supreme accuracy of my water level (see pic below)
Perhaps I should have left it at home, because I wouldn't have been quite so picky about the braces being level and the Height being so spot on as she was.
Something tells me that my usual "she'll be right" attitude towards unseen, unimportant, irrelevant construction details needs an overhaul, as Liza isn't going to like "close enough to caulk" as a house building mantra.
I'm going adopt a new mentality towards this project, one that I strive for in my furniture making and that is;
"To make as perfectly as possible" this is also the title of a new book being published by Lost Art Press, a translation of a French work on marquetry, by Andre Rubbo.
Still not sure if it applies to our garden furniture.
Now to get permanent seats in place and back into the wall again.
Yes that is a 6' ladder in the middle!
No, not that swinging... Today we visited the second hand timber guy and got some 150mm treated posts. 4.5m long with the intention of building an awesome swing for the tin lids and big enough for the big kids too.
what's the legal overhang?
cutting the notches for the housing joints
housing joint completed with bolt hole
Fence finished
With all the extra work that we've had on at work and the rain i haven't had a chance to get up to the block to take a photo of the completed fence. It's a little sad now that it is finished as it makes it look so formal and hemmed in. But i guess that it the job of a fence.
Our neighbours are quick off the mark and have already planted some native plants along a new stretch fence.
The contractor did a good job and it looks as though it will last at least two or three generations.
Completed boundary fence
new plantings along fence lines - natives
Strong foundations
Also completed this afternoon was the end of the first course of the garden wall foundations (if you can call them that).
Although they look higglety pigglety, they are rock solid and do not move under foot as you walk across them, proof that the are tightly bound together and should provide a stable platform for our low garden wall.
Now to start on getting it out of the ground!
Well not so sweet as a Banana split, but I did have an equally rewarding afternoon.
I split my first rock today using the feathers (shims) and wedges that my father made me for my birthday and boy is it fun strangely fun.
It worked just as the book I'd read said it would and that's just fantastic for me. To take new found information and apply it, is as rewarding as any other challenge i've come across.
So here's the quick version.
Buy a rotary hammer drill. This is very important, why? See my previous post on burning out a drill!
Drill holes 150mm or so apart
Insert feathers with wedge
Tap continually in sequence till you hear a great, immensely satisfying but little, snick.
So the rock I bought home to practice on was large enough to split twice. So now, out of one somewhat unusable round stone I now have three, very useful flat bottomed face stones one of which will be used in a corner. (A very important location)
One happy chappy today.
Now i'm going looking for those large difficult rocks!
So my father sent me a birthday gift yesterday; some feathers and wedges that he made for me, so I may attempt to split some of these rocks for our garden wall.
Whilst a little inconsistent I have a feeling that they will work very well. He used 20mm round bar and cut off the feather from each side and had them hardened at a local place in Glen Innes.
my hands after one minute pushed me to a better solution!
I found a 20mm masonry drill bit to use in my smallish Makita hammer drill.
Now from what I've read this may not quite be up to the task of drilling all day but I thought that I could at least practice to see what would be possible with the right equipment.
So I chucked up the drill bit and set to work on the first hole. 1 minute passed and my hands got that crazy itch you get from too much vibration, a bit like those old vibrating exercise machines from the 80's and with out much progress, just like the 80's exercise craze I guess.
I got to thinking.... There is a better way.
I thought of ways to automate the process particularly holding the drill and adding force to the handle.
I thought of adding weights on top but it seemed clumsy and then I thought of an image in a book that I have read many times. Scott landis' workbench book. On the back cover of my version there is a picture of an old guy holding a log down on a trestle using a rope or chain and his foot. Awsome I thought, that'll do me.
So in about two minutes I had two lengths of timber and a rope.
Drilled holes is the ends of the timber and tied the rope between them.
Place one length under the stone and the other stuck out the side. Looped the rope up and over the back of the drill.
It works great! The harder I tread on the timber the more force is added to the drill. It was so successful I drilled an inch in about 30 seconds and I didn't even have to apply any drive with my hands!
During that time I quickly learned that too much pressure is not so great as the drill struggled a bit.
After about 31 seconds I could smell that ominous stench of electrical overloading, bad bad bad. After 35 seconds before I'd even had time to consider stoping smoke billowed from the vents in the body if the drill and it ceased turning.
Both delighted and disappointed as the progress was fast! But I'm now with a hammer drill, a small problem. Warranty I hear you say, we'll as Murphy would have it, it's 8 months out. Boo hoo...
There's the one who learns by reading, a few who learn through observation and the rest have to pee on the electric fence themselves.
No we're not putting up an electric fence but this past week did see the strainer posts for the fence erected.
Now that the concrete is set the fencing contractor will be back later in the week to complete the rest.
The other photo shows the beginning of the low stone wall that will separate the veggie garden and the lawn.
I've not got a flat stone on the whole property I swear, thus this wall is going to be a challenge!
This afternoon I took my youngest daughter Abigail up to the block to layout and start to dig the trench for the first part of our dry-stone garden wall.
She was a star and very funny, taking two sticks and drumming on everything! "dad, DAD! listen to this" on the grass, different rocks, the cro-bar the shovel, I stopped her short of drumming on the car.
She had a ball playing in the red dirt that I dug up.
Now 'dug up' is a funny term, you see the ground is so very hard that I needed to use the cro-bar on every inch! there was no "digging", with a full force drop of my heavy bar, it made it only 5 or so centimetres! Basically i removed the sod from about 5 metres of trench 900mm wide with the bar... I think I need a mattock?
At least this time I beat the cro-bar, no blisters! I used the bar continuously for an hour and my hands feel as though they have worked, that's for sure but no blisters so I guess I win.
Once I made it through the 5m it was time to break for dinner but i noticed that the bottom of the trench was no where near level, So next time I'm up there ill remove some high spots and level it out.
Now I got to figuring, how could I do this best by my self?
I have a water level, but it normally uses two people or bucket and pressure that I haven't got my head around yet, so this evening I went out to the shed and selected a few lengths of suitable stuff and quickly dressed it up. Ended up with a piece of black wood, a piece of QLD Silver Ash, and a piece of northern Silky Oak. and knocked up an "A frame"
You can see in the pictures below that an A frame is simply two long length of timber with a cross bar. Add to this a plumb bob and a couple of pencil marks and you've got a hand tool for finding levels that are the same.
These are normally used to follow contours in land for surveying etc but I think it will work equally level in helping me find the level in the bottom of my not so deep trench.
Preparing stock with the jack plane. Notice my great working holding devise, a wedge fashioned for old flooring with an axe and used to wedge the board in place between to bench dogs.
The completed A frame. Bolts through the leg and a old hinge at the top hold it in place. Notice the Plumb, hanging on the string line
Notice the pencil marks.
To "calibrate" the a frame you mark the location of the string once. turn the Frame around, being careful to observe the location of the feet and placing them accurately in the same location, although reversed. Marking the new location of the string line.
A new line half way between these two line should show that the two feet or on the same plane.
Total cost... nought. recycled everything. If you didn't all ready have a plumb bob, you course use anything heavy like a small stone for instance.
Just because i have one of these it's no excuse you erase the dumpy level from my wish list.
This guy is a bit full-on (read American) but he discribes the use of the A-frame pretty well.
"Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning. "
W. Churchill
So last week we got a little busy with planning and came up with this!
Hopefully you can make out the pegs and the red and white tape that mark out the approximate boundary of the house. Minus the veranda.
This is one of the best planning activities we've done. Although I believe that I'm quite capable of visualizing drawings, it really helped us see it in the flesh.
